Inaugural - Dissertation, Universität Halle-Wittenberg. / Cover title. Lebenslauf.

No description available.

In this thesis, I argue that late-Romantic women writers Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon were embedded in, and intent on discussing the intersection of gender, celebrity, and performance in their poetry. In Chapter One, I examine Hemans’s and Landon’s public personae to trace how they navigated the commercial society. Each poet crafted a persona which, as was the trend in this period, was often conflated with the characters depicted in their writings. This worked to their pecuniary advantage but had ambivalent social consequences as well. In Chapter Two, I establish how both Hemans and Landon reconfigured Germaine de Staël’s novel Corinne (1807) in their poetry to suit their poetic styles. This retelling of the Improvisatrice profession made room for feminine, public genius in print. It also rendered the character of Corinne more English and drew out the North-South binaries and tensions of the political moment. Through this kind of feminist cross-cultural reading, I conceptualize another way of reading late-Romantic sentimental poetry, and the “poetess” personae that often accompany it, ambivalently engaged in both Continental and colonial politics. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1955 O96 / Master of Science

Antebellum political historians have long studied the era between Andrew Jackson’s election and the secession crisis through the colored knowledge of the Civil War. This project is an effort to reverse that trend. It explores northeast Tennessee’s political culture from the late 1830s through the start of the Civil War. It reveals that the Second American Party System, a wave of new enfranchised voters, and the area’s demographics mixed together to lay a foundation for the aggressive and populist political style that permeated the region from the 1830s through the 1850s. At the heart of these issues was the transition of power from East Tennessee to Middle Tennessee. As a way to analyze the region’s political culture, I look specifically at Democrats Andrew Johnson and Landon Carter Haynes and Whigs William Brownlow and Thomas Nelson.

Liquefaction is a costly phenomenon where soil shear modulus degrades as the generation of excess pore pressures begins. One of the methods to mitigate liquefaction, is the use of prefabricated vertical drains. Prefabricated vertical drains provide a drainage path to effectively mitigate the generation of pore pressures and aid in shear modulus recovery. The aims of this study were to define shear modulus degradation vs. shear strain as a function of excess pore pressure ratio; define the effects of prefabricated vertical drains on the behavior of pore pressure generation vs. shear strain; and to define volumetric strain as a function of shear strain and excess pore pressure ratios. A large-scale laminar shear box test was conducted and measured on clean sands with prefabricated vertical drains spaced at 3-feet and 4-feet. The resulting test data was analyzed and compared to data without vertical drains. The results show the effect of increasing excess pore pressure ratios on shear modulus and curves where developed to encompass these effects in design with computer programing like SHAKE or DEEPSOIL. The data also suggests that prefabricated vertical drains effectively mitigate excess pore pressure build-up, thus increased the shear strain resistance before pore pressures were generated. Regarding volumetric strain, the results suggests that the primary factor governing the measured settlement is the excess pore pressure ratio. This indicates that if the drains can reduce the excess pore pressure ratio, then the resulting settlement can successfully be reduced during a shaking event. The curves for shear modulus vs. cyclic shear strain as function of pore pressure ratio were developed using data with high strain and small strain which leaves a gap of data in the cyclic shear strain range of 0.0001 to 0.01. Further large-scale testing with appropriate sensitivity is needed to observe the effect excess pore pressure generation on intermediate levels of cyclic shear strain.

"Image and Text" focuses on the consequences of multi-media interaction on the concept of a work's meaning(s) in three distinct publishing trends in nineteenth-century Britain: graphic satire, the literary annuals, and book illustration. The graphic satire of engravers James Gillray and George Cruikshank is replete with textual components that rely on the interaction of media for the overall satirical impact. Literary annuals combine engravings with the ekphrastic poetry of writers including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Book illustrations provided writers Sir Walter Scott and Alfred, Lord Tennyson a means to recycle previously published works as "new" texts; the engravings promote an illusion of textual originality and reality by imparting visual meanings onto the text. In turn, the close proximity of text to image changes visual meanings by making the images susceptible to textual meanings. Many of the theoretical implications resulting from the pairing of media resound in modern film adaptations, which often provide commentary about nineteenth-century visual culture and the self-reflexivity of media. The critical heritage that has responded to the pairing of media in nineteenth-century print culture often expresses uneasiness with the relationship between text and mechanically produced images, and this uneasiness has often resulted in the treatment of text and image as separate components of multi-media works. "Image and Text" recovers the dialogue between media in nineteenth-century print forms often overlooked in critical commentary that favors the study of an elusive and sometimes fictional concept of an original work; each chapter acknowledges the collaborative nature of the production of multi-media works and their ability to promote textual newness, originality (or the illusion of originality), and (un)reality. Multi-media works challenge critical conventions regarding artistic and authorial originality, and they enter into battles over fidelity of meaning. By recognizing multi-media works as part of a diverse genre it becomes possible to expand critical dialogue about such works past fidelity studies. Text and image cannot faithfully represent the other; what they can do is engage in dialogue: with each other, with their historical and cultural moments, and with their successors and predecessors.

Contemporary scholarship has seen increasing interest in the study of elegy. The present work attempts to elevate and expand discussions of death and survival beyond the ambit of elegy to a more genre-inclusive and ethically sensitive survey of Romantic posthumous life writings. Combining an ethic of remembrance founded on mutual fulfilment and reciprocal care with the Romantic tendency to hybridise different genres of mourning and commemoration, the study re- conceives 'posthumous life' as the 'inexhaustible' product of endless collaboration between the dead, the dying and the living. This thesis looks to the philosophical meditations of Francis Bacon, John Locke and Emmanuel Levinas for an ethical framework of human protection, fulfilment and preservation. In an effort to locate the origin of posthumous life writing, the first chapter examines the philosophical context in which different genres and media of commemoration emerged in the eighteenth century. Accordingly, it will commence with a survey of Enlightenment attitudes toward posthumous sympathy and the threat of death. The second part of the chapter turns to the tangled histories of epitaph, biography, portraiture, sepulchre and elegy in the writings of Samuel Johnson, Henry Kett, Vicesimus Knox, William Godwin and William Wordsworth. The Romantic culture of mourning and commemoration inherits the intellectual and generic legacies of the Enlightenment. Hence, Chapter Two will try to uncover the complex generic and formal crossovers between epitaph, extempore, effusion, elegy and biography in Wordsworth's 'Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg' (1835-7) and his 'Epitaph' (1835-7) for Charles Lamb. However, the chapter also recognises the ethical repercussions of Wordsworth's inadequate, even mortifying, treatment of a fellow woman writer in his otherwise successful expression of ethical remembrance. To address the problem of gender in Romantic memorialisation, Chapter Three will take a close look at Letitia Elizabeth Landon' s reply to Wordsworth's incompetent defence of Felicia Hemans. Mediating the ambitions and anxieties of her subject, as well as her public image and private pain, 'Felicia Hemans' (1838) is an audacious composite of autograph, epitaph, elegy, corrective biography and visual portraiture. The two closing chapters respond to Thomas Carlyle's outspoken confidence in 'Portraits and Letters' as indispensable aids to biographies. Chapter Four identifies a tentative connection between the aesthetic of visual portraiture and the ethic of life writing. To demonstrate the convergence of both artistic and humane principles, this cross-media analysis will first evaluate Sir Joshua Reynolds's memoirs of his deceased friends. Then, it will compare Wordsworth's and Hemans's verse reflections on the commemorative power and limitation of iconography. The last chapter assesses the role of private correspondence in the continuation of familiar relation and reciprocal support. Landon's dramatic enactment of a 'feminine Robinson Crusoe' in her letters from Africa urges the unbroken offering of service and remembrance to a fallen friend through posthumous correspondence. The concluding section will consider the ethical implications for the belated memorials and services furnished by friends and colleagues in the wake of her death.